What's your worst ever video game-related purchase?

Listening to an old clip of Jeff talking about buying a lifetime subscrption of the Star Trek MMO got me thinking: What's the worst game-related purchase you ever did? For me it's probably the Ouya and the Power Glove(yeah...).

When I was a kid I wanted really Spiderman 2. I didn't have a console to run it, so I asked for the gba version instead thinking they were the same. Boy was I in for a surprise.

Tabula Rasa. I think they shut down that game two months after I got a copy.

A PSP, I mostly wound up using it a MP3 player and picture viewer, I'm not saying I didn't have fun with it sometimes but for the most part all of the games I played on it were just so bad and wish I had used the 200 bucks towards, like, anything else.

Dear Esther and The Witcher 1

Chromehounds and Too Human. I didn't have good internet when I had Chromehounds so multiplayer wasn't an option.

Why Too Human WHY are you so bad.

I bought the first Saints Row for £50 in Woolworths. Bad move.

Dear God!

The last Sim City, purchased it, it was broken (forgot to get refund through Origins convoluted money back thing), never played it since, total waste of money :0

Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon

Oh boy.

I bought Aliens: Colonial Marines for £45. A mistake.

Halo 4.

I normally don't make bad decisions with my gaming purchases because I keep myself informed. Just had faith that 343 would get it right, but nope.

Superman Returns for the 360. I have no excuses, as I had even tried the demo beforehand. No idea what I was thinking at the time.

Whatever the hell I spent on SMNC. Ir's one of those instances where the game had a lot of problems, people kept leaving because of those problems, the developer didn't think the problems were worth solving because of the amount of people playing, and the game was left on it's own to die.

I played Crazy Taxi once in an arcade. Then a few weeks later I bought it on the PS2 for £45. It was a fun game for the first hour but the novelty wore off very quickly.

The Ouya. I preordered it just as a curiosity and have a piece of video game history in my collection, then I forgot about it until its release. I live in Canada, so when it arrives at my door I apparently have to pay custom fees in order to even receive it on top of the price of the console that I had already paid for.

I played a couple of demos on the day that I got it and I have never touched it since.

I can't think of any really. I've never played something so fucking repugnant that the only thing I took away from it was a passage of time. Even poor games are interesting to me, from at least an academic standpoint. And sure, I wouldn't voluntarily buy a bad game, or more importantly a game I didn't like, but sometimes that is going to happen. I find it best to use it as a learning experience. If you're a creative, look at what they did wrong, process that, and learn from it. If you just want to make fun of the goofy mistakes, use the game's flaws as a centerpiece for discussion, you're still actually pulling something pretty valuable from that. And if none of that applies, go microwave the disk, that looks pretty rad. Definitely worth a few bucks to see that.

Bravely Default, what fucking garbage. I also bought a Wii at launch for $400 which was a terrible idea.

I can't think of many. If I had to pick something, it'd be when I was about 14/15 and bought this Microsoft adaptor that you plugged a headset into and it'd let you control who you would talk to on your team/teams in multiplayer games. I bought it when I started getting into UT2k3 because I thought I was going to join a clan and would need such a communication device. I joined a clan but they like most clans were rubbish and never used mics. You got something like five different channels. It turned out though that everyone needed to be using the same software. It was useless for me. I think I spend about €50 on it.

*EDIT*

I found it. This thing. Worst thing I've bought for gaming.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope, it is the only game I have ever traded in.

I'll offer two answers: financially, it was buying the Knights of the Old Republic uber special edition in an attempt to flip it on eBay (yeah, I don't normally do it, but I was making some decent money with my eBay business at the time and thought I could make a few bucks). The market for that game crashed so hard and so fast that I lost quite a bit of money offloading it in the end.

Quality-wise, I'd say Total Recall for the NES. It's sadly one of those games time forgot in terms of famously bad NES games, but it's a contender for worst 10 on the system in my book (AVGN briefly covered it in his Arnold NES game video).

I bought Stalin vs. Martians when it came out on steam... I also bought Nether for 3 dollars.

Paying the price of a full game for a premium tank in World of Tanks. Stupid sexy IS-6...

@jesus_phish: Haha, I remember buying that POS myself. Looking back at it, I've bought a lot of stupid game-related shit growing up. It's mostly hardware though, I've very rarely regretted a game purchase enough to say that it was a dissapointing purchase.

Gonna say the Guitar Hero World Tour band set. That thing was pretty garbage and I never used the drums or mic anyway.

Spider-Man 2 on PC.

>:\

Probably some game on Steam. That service is actually kind of awful. I like Origin and GOG a ton better. Steam has a bunch of older games for sale that don't actually work. When I ask them for a refund they decline. Basically saying: sue us. Knowing I can't afford to do that. Should've told them I was religious I guess. At least GOG goes in and works on older games to make sure they work before selling them.

The safe answer would be to just point at my Steam library, but...

I guess, if I'm going by amount of money spent I'd have to go with the Xbox 360. I can only remember playing one or two games on it, but I do remember having to spend a bunch of money on repairing/replacing it several times thanks to the old Red Ring of Death.

The Force Unleashed 2 special edition. It was something like 90 bucks when it came out and it took less time to finish than watching one of the Star Wars films.

The first one wasn't perfect, but it had some great ideas, so I was hoping the sequel would really improve on it like a lot of second games in a franchise do. I was all, "Hey, this is pretty good!" then got the what I thought was the end of the first chapter of the game, only to have the credits roll...

I can think of many regrettable impulse "it was on sale" purchases over the past several years (thanks steam/GOG!), but it has been a while since I have actively regretted buying a full price game.

When I buy bad things, chances are I know what I am getting into.

Probably the Xbox 360 I bought for £100 to play Fable 2 and Mass Effect 2. I ended up getting bored of Fable early on and Mass Effect 2 had a PS3 release just after I started playing it. Then I built a PC anyway and could have played it on there. Ohwell.

I think to qualify, it can't just be a game you were disappointed with. It's got to be so bad that people talk about how bad it is years down the road.

So, Daikatana.

I'm super bad at remembering stuff like this. I'd say my most recent bad purchase has been Watch_Dogs, that game is not worth full retail price at all. Its 'mash the square button to do EVERYTHING' gimmick stops being fun after the first hour of gameplay.

I also bought enter the matrix for the gamecube, that might historically be my worst game related purchase ever, man that game sucked.

Two Worlds and Hour of Victory.

There is a few but the first one that came to mind was Dungeon Lords for the PC. That game was just straight broken and missing content that was advertised on the back of the box. Eck!

@themanwithnoplan: I did the same thing but got the PC version which is a kids game, totally different from the console versions and its terrible.

Fuck this game, the first one was a great length, cool if not amazing story, tried to setup some good combat scenarios some of the levels were just open enough.

Force Unleashed 2 was short, rushed, full of bugs, looked BAD in spots and did not build on Anything the first one did I literally could not believe how soulless it was.

There are a couple that spring to mind. Guitar Hero Metallica was not very good (even as someone who was way into Metallica when they bought it), Dishonored mocks me every time I look at it on my shelf. I think my worst purchase was Castlevania: Harmony of Despair.

Assassins Creed 3 and Resident Evil 6 for a total of £75, my conscience would not let me return/trade them.

Breach on XBLA, the heavily advertised "destructible environments" was extremely disappointing and there was pretty much no-one playing when i bought it the day after launch, went back and still could hardly find a match. never played it again, bringing my total playtime to about 45 minutes for what I think was 1200 MS points at the time. that was 3 and a half years ago and it still bums me out.

Medal of Honor Warfighter, god fucking damnit, what a waste of money.

In June of 2011 I paid full price for both the 360 and PC versions of: Duke Nukem Forever, F.3.A.R. and Red Faction Armageddon. That was dumb.

Also, buying that Fender Pro Guitar for Rock Band 3 that I never used was also dumb.

Philips CD-i .. at the time it was all my savings.

Recently I bought Sega Genesis Ultimate Collection, although it's not expensive, it's a mistake. I grew up with for a few years with SNES and jumped into PSOne, but never played Sega games at all. So I have 0 nostalgia for the games.

Altered Beast is overly difficult, Sonic doesn't click with me, and some of the games in the collection are bit dated. My only hope is that I could find some time to play Phantasy Star in the future.

On the flip side, I got the classic PSOne shmup, Sonic Wings Special (not related to Sonic Hedgehog), and it's really a fun vertical shmup.

Perfect Dark Zero

Love Greg Kasavin but he got that shit wrong.

Anyone else care to vote for the PlayStation Move? Useless piece o' crap.

Dark Souls. Not so much that I didn't like the game, more that I paid full price for it and totally bought into all the hype. If I had got it for like $10 at a Steam sale I wouldn't feel so bad.

Uh, i bought all the CoD:MW2 map packs. Why? I barely played the game at that point. I MAYBE played each new map once? it was like what? 30 bucks down the drain, i coulda got a new game for that! Blah!

Fuck mappacks btw, overpriced bullshit.

I loved loved LOVED Splash Damage's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I took a day off work, and had built a whole new PC beforehand to play Brink.

Oh god. Why.

I bought Assassins creed 2, Brotherhood and Revelations during a steam sale all at the same time. Not saying they're bad games but I should have just bought one to see if they were my kind of a game. Turns out I don't like AC games. I also bought Dark Sector full price before Giant Bomb had their famous non-review of the game.